“The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, are getting personal. They shot their new film in suburban Minnesota, where they grew up as sons of Jewish academics. But if you're expecting something warm and fuzzy, circa 1967, you don't know the Coens, and A Serious Man is no country for you. This seriously funny movie, artfully photographed by the great Roger Deakins, is spiritual in nature, barbed in tone, and, oh, yeah, it stings like hell.

Front and center is Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor who's getting shit from every side. Unsigned letters to the dean question his ethics and threaten his tenure. His son, Danny (the excellent Aaron Wolff), days away from his bar mitzvah, is lost in a pot daze. His daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), is obsessed with getting a nose job. His unemployed brother, Arthur (a wonderfully kinky Richard Kind), is crashing on his couch. And his wife, Judith (a pitch-perfect Sari Lennick), is leaving him for slimy, silver-tongued Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), a serious man.

Larry is being tested like Job, with the Coens playing God and lobbing bolts at him, including a Jew-hating neighbor and a nude lady sunbather who stirs his libido. Larry's divorce lawyer (a deadpan Adam Arkin) warns him to expect the worst. So Larry seeks counsel and comfort from multiple rabbis, who deliver silence or cryptic bromides. Grace Slick, on the radio, gets closer to the point, singing, “When the truth is found to be lies/And all the joy within you dies/Don't you want somebody to love.”

Indeed. No doubt the Coens will grin at accusations of stereotyping, self-loathing and box-office suicide. They march to their own mischievous drummer. Larry keeps asking, “Why me?” and stage actor Stuhlbarg, Tony-nominated for The Pillowman, is outstanding at showing the humanity that keeps the question urgent. Larry gets the worst of both worlds, sacred and secular. The film starts with a Yiddish-language prologue, set a century ago in Poland, in which a couple open their door to find a needy neighbor who may be a dybbuk (demon) in disguise. Larry is similarly bedeviled. But that sound you hear in this profane spellbinder is the Coens — chuckling in the dark.” – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, 1st October 2009.

“The short version:
A ridiculously great movie. Funny as hell. I really loved this one.

The long version:
This is a phenomenal film. Is it too much to ask that it become a big success? Is that at all possible?

Larry Gopnik is comfortable. He doesn't get a lot of respect from many folks around him, but he's achieved something and is maintaining it. He's even up for tenure at the university where he is a professor. So it comes as a great shock to him that not everyone around him is happy with the status quo.

His wife wants a divorce, and has gone so far as to find his replacement (someone for whom she DOES have respect). Someone has been sending letters, urging the university against granting him tenure. He's forced to move into a divey motel with his mostly useless brother and his sebaceous cyst. Things that seemed stable, are no longer.

And I guess that's what the movie is about – what does one do, when the illusion of stability is taken away?

Michael Stuhlberg is a total revelation as the put-upon Gopnik. He is absolutely perfectly cast here, and turns in a smart, funny and sensitive performance. He has a silent movie star's face and needs to be shot in black and white at some point.

The movie itself is screamingly funny at points. If you like the Coen Brothers' sense of humor, you will revel in this film. They get everything right here. The ‘Tale of the Goy's Teeth” in particular, is a killer sequence. The audience was in hysterics.

As a goy, myself, there were quite a few moments of jewish ephemera with which I was not particularly familiar, but none of it seemed to be need-to-know. I didn't feel left behind at any point by some inexplicable practice. I don't think the niche setting should in any way preclude a niche audience.

If there's anything that keeps the film from being practically perfect, it is the inclusion of the accursed “all-just-a-dream” sequences. And not just one. Nothing kills the enjoyment of a movie more for me, than suddenly discovering that what I'd just seen was all just pretend. I have no issue with dream sequences – they can give more insight into what a character is going through, and give the filmmakers opportunity for visuals they may not otherwise get away with in the reality of their movie, but when we're led to believe something is real, and it turns out it ain't? Fuck that.

So, that brought my overall score down a bit, but in spite of that, I loved this movie unreservedly. I would make a long-term commitment to this movie if I knew it a little better. Maybe after a couple more dates? Who knows?”

“Stay through the end credits of Joel and Ethan Coen's  A Serious Man and you'll find the disclaimer: “No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture.” That statement is open to dispute, since most of the film's characters are Jewish — residents of suburban Minneapolis in 1967 — and just about all of them, it seems, are out to harm the Coens' hapless hero, college physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlberg), either intentionally or just by ignoring his mostly mute cries for help.

Not that the Coen brothers — who were raised in an academic Jewish family in Minneapolis, and were 13 and 10 respectively when the movie takes place — are self or other-hating Jews. But as filmmakers (and Oscar-winners, last year, for  No Country for Old Men ), they've always enjoyed anatomizing humanity's weak points and turning them into a kind of comedy. The lynch party, composed of Jews and gentiles, that assembles around Larry is full of these caricatures. And Larry was made to be intimidated, ignored, abused. He is a passive protagonist whose plight earns him as much pity as sympathy. So A Serious Man , which has its world premiere tonight at the Toronto Film Festival before opening in theaters Oct. 2, ?is a rare event in movies, where action is character. It's certainly rare for the Coens, in that this is one fable—  Miller's Crossing might be another — that is worth taking seriously.

In the two weeks leading up to his son's bar mitzvah, Larry is subject to a catalog of social crimes, small and large. His wife Judy (Sari Lennick) has become close with family friend Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed); she wants Sy to move in and Larry to stay at the Jolly Roger. Larry and Judith's son (Aaron Wolff) is slumming through Hebrew school and harangues Dad to adjust the rooftop TV aerial so  F Troop can come in clearly. Their daughter (Jessica McManus) thinks only getting a nose job and washing her hair, which she can't do nearly enough of because Larry's live-in, layabout brother (Richard Kind) spends a lot of time in the bathroom medicating his neck cyst.

At work, where Larry is up for tenure, a Korean student to whom he gave a failing grade leaves him an envelope full of bribe money; when Larry refuses, the student's father drops by to say he may sue the professor for defamation. The neighbor on one side is a belligerent, moose-killing goy; on the other side is not threat but temptation in the form of a pretty woman (Amy Landecker) who smokes pot while sunbathing nude. Anything else? Larry's legal bills are piling up, he just crashed his car, he needs to visit his doctor, and the guy from the Columbia Record Club keeps calling to dun him for a membership Larry never took out. According to those in his local synagogue, he isn't even the serious man of the title; that honorific goes to the oleaginous, wife-stealing Sy. Compared to Larry, Job had it easy.

Larry is a familiar figure from Jewish literature that dates back to the Old Testament and up to Bruce Jay Friedman's 1962 novel  Stern , about a Jew who moves to the suburbs and endures a plague of abuse from neighbors and nature. The men at the center of Philip Roth's novels may rage and flail, but Larry doesn't dish out insults, he takes them. When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, just suck it up and hope you don't explode. That's Larry's method of coping. In Stuhlberg's precise embodiment, Larry accepts all tribulations with a mouth pressed into pruny silence, as if ?he had bitten into something rancid but doesn't want to be seen spitting it out. Wouldn't matter if he did: no one gives him a moment to articulate the psychic pains he harbors.

The movie has no stars, few recognizable faces. And unlike so many American films, which cast gentiles in Jewish roles (Imelda Staunton, for example, as the stereotype mother in Ang Lee's  Taking Woodstock , also about suburban Jews in the '60s), this one actually has ethnic-appropriate casting. The Jews here are sometimes broadly drawn — Larry's family slurps soup at a decibel level that even the Simpsons would find deafening — but they're fully assimilated. Nobody says, “Oy vey!” or talks shtick. If people answer a question with a question, the first would be Larry's plaintive “Why me?” when he seeks legal, emotional or spiritual help, and the second the world's “Who cares?”

Richard Corliss, Time

“Can I have been completely wrong about the Coens for more than two decades?  Raising Arizona and Barton Fink were my gateway drugs into what I thought was significant cinema; now I cringe at how painfully wacky those movies are. Meanwhile, by the time  The Big Lebowski came out, I thought I had smartened up, so I brandished my dislike. Yet that film is so clearly their sweetest: a frog-and-toad story and a masterpiece.

Now comes  A Serious Man , set in Jewish suburban Minnesota in 1967. The drama shows the Coens still keenly attuned to language and banality, almost to the point of caricature. But pinned behind their gorgeous compositions (capturing the woody, ashtray-laden decors of lawyers' offices and synagogues) is a new feeling, a modulation on Fargo 's desperation. Finally, I feel that the brothers have written their signature script, about trying to hold it all together amid so much tightly wound phoniness. No matter how aggressively lacquered their style is, it totally works in this case, and beautifully.

The plot is basically one man's breakdown, that of math professor Larry Gopnik (the extraordinary Michael Stuhlbarg, underplaying the character's neuroticism; he'd find  Barton Fink a  shanda for the goyim). His wife is leaving him for a rotund habitual hugger. Larry's uncertain about his tenure track, a student is blackmailing him, and his neighbor might be a virulent anti-Semite. But compared with the heavy lifting of something like  American Beauty, A Serious Man fills its running time with smartly observed smaller details that might amount to nothing: half-cognizant rituals, the sonorous croons of cantors and the misadventures of a stoned bar mitzvah boy.

It's not Neil Simon–esque nostalgia, but rather a dark satire on the idea of living an upright life. Larry, in his increasing panic, consults several rabbis whose wisdom is questionable. The parables they tell him go nowhere; one of them, magnificently spun to a Jimi Hendrix jam, might be the Coens' finest sequence, period. I have a line of dialogue stuck in my head, too good to overexplain with context: “Accept the mystery.” It's the wisest thing the Coens have written, and I'm wondering if I finally need to accept that they've become profound.”

If Joel and Ethan Coen's “A Serious Man” were classifiable in familiar movie terms, one might consider this oddly compelling period piece as “The Chosen” meets “American Beauty.” But, as usual, there's nothing familiar about the Coen brothers except their own quixotic ways. While their latest black comedy suggests a greater element of autobiography, it's loaded with contorted stylistic flourishes and hilarious moments of baffling existential ruminations. Chronicling the relentlessly ill-fated exploits of neurotic Jewish math teacher Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg) in the late 1960s, it feels like a throwback to the “Barton Fink” days of spectacularly meaningless symbolism, loads of gallows humor and genuine directorial finesse. Coen fans should rejoice: For these guys, more of the same basically means a return to form.

Even with its recognizable tropes, there's an element of ingenuity to “A Serious Man” when situated in the Coen canon. The movie synthesizes their past and present achievements. Recalling the situational comedy of “Burn After Reading” (which itself recalled the situational comedy of “Fargo”), Larry's problems form a laundry list of insurmountable woes: He grapples with his nagging wife Judith (Sari Lennick) and her patronizing lover Sy (Fred Melamed), desperately tries to communicate with his aimless son (Aaron Wolff) on the brink of his bar mitzvah, dodges threats from a disgruntled student and feebly attempts to help his deadbeat brother (Richard Kind) solve a gambling problem. Though Larry's troubles are exploited for the sake of the Coens' prankish tendencies, he perseveres by way of spiritual convictions that play out with unexpected sincerity. Adopting a desperate stare and constant naivete, Larry oozes pathos. As an archaic symbol of the post-World War II nuclear family, he represents a dying breed, recalling Tommy Lee Jones's resigned stance in “No Country for Old Men.” Thus, “A Serious Man” draws liberally from the Coens' own work. At once devilishly confounding and mature, it's unquestionably their most personal movie yet.

The facts speak for themselves: Born in the late 1950s, the Coens grew up in a Jewish suburb of Minneapolis most likely akin to the white picket fence world where Larry's story takes place. As a gateway to the filmmakers' nostalgia trip, the movie suggests an emotional honesty unseen in their previous films. If Larry's community bears a resemblance to the one of the Coens' youth, then we should be able to read it as a guide to the seeds of their inspiration. Larry's son embodies adolescent confusion, but he's also an essential witness (as the Coens may have been) to the religious community's tired rituals and incessant vanity. Coen characters who want to control their fates generally suffer as a result, and Larry makes no exception. The odds are always against him. Despite his good nature, he's punished for sincerity, a factor that injects the movie with secular convictions.

Nearly everyone in “A Serious Man”—including, it seems, the handful of rabbis that Larry visits at the brink of his frustration—constantly chase their beliefs in desperate attempts to maintain faith in some grand scheme, and yet a final cohesive vision never comes together. A lengthy anecdote about teeth with godly engravings goes nowhere. Various other narrative tangents, such as Larry's attraction to a seductive neighbor seemingly lifted from “The Graduate,” merely pile onto the story's existing density and occasional detract from its underlying substance. However, the Coens sustain the movie through its arbitrary moments thanks to their handy playbook of bizarre cinematic techniques, including offbeat musical montages, dream sequences and an array of compelling performances. It's disorientation as entertainment. On paper, Larry's plight almost makes sense, but the big picture remains unfocused.

Instead, we get fragments of ideas that implicitly criticize the restricted nature of Larry's Jewish community. The Coens perfected the art of the strange a long time ago, but I'm not sure if they've ever been quite so esoteric: “A Serious Man” opens with a quote from the Talmudic scholar Rashi, drifts into a late-1800s prologue spoken entirely in Yiddish, and contains unsubtitled Hebrew school jargon. Larry's wife tells him she needs a “get”—a Jewish certificate of divorce—so that she doesn't become an “agunah,” a woman chained to her marriage. Since the Coens explain so little, many viewers will identify with Larry's ongoing confusion. There's an undeniable Biblical quality to his Job-like suffering as he desperately tries to justify his misfortunes. “Is Hashem trying to say we are all one?” he wonders aloud after a plot twist that would suggest as much. He gets no clear answer, and neither do we.

Still, the Coens actually manage to deliver a vaguely heartwarming fable about family bonds and coming-of-age experiences (the stoned bar mitzvah climax qualifies as one of their great set pieces). But just when the sentimentalism settles in, the brothers retreat from a neat finale, allowing Larry's world to simply devolve into an endless tsunami of tsuris.” – Eric Kohn, indieWIRE

VANITY FAIR (Michael Hogan)

Can I make a confession? I'm not usually a fan of things that are super Jewish.Jewish I like. In fact, Jewish I love! My list of Jewish cultural heroes ranges from Franz Kafka to Bob Dylan to Sarah Silverman, with about a bazillion stops in between. But super-Jewish stories about shtetls and magic-realist rabbis—all thatFiddler on the Roof crap? Meh! I'm Irish American, with my own schmaltzy ancestral pseudohistory to mythologize, feel guilty about, and feel superior for overcoming. Spare me the Nathan Englander routine. I don't need another nightmare to wake up from.

Prejudices are made to be renounced, though. For example, just when I swore I'd never willingly sit through another exigesis of the cultural dislocations of the 60s, Mad Men landed and revived the entire genre for me. (I still refuse to seeTaking Woodstock though.) And now along comes A Serious Man, which is as super-Jewish as the Coen brothers are likely ever to get. It's also seriously awesome.

One reason is that it's the opposite of a soft-headed meditation on love, faith, and destiny. Instead, it's an extremely hard-headed meditation on love, faith, and destiny. It starts with the kind of period flashback that usually gives me the hives: in snowy Eastern somewhere or other, a thickly bearded man arrives home to tell his stonefaced wife—in subtitled Yiddish—that he just had a chance encounter with an old friend of hers. “God has cursed us!” she declares. The man in question died years ago. Then there's a thump on the door. The man—or is he a “dybbuk,” as the wife insists—has arrived, at the husband's invitation. If it weren't a Coen brothers movie, you expecting this to be followed with some cornball special effects and a neatly wrapped lesson. Instead, you just know that someone could be fed into the proverbial wood chipper at any moment.

Without giving too much away, though, I would submit that there is a lesson here, or at least a dilemma—one that tastes more and more bitter as the movie chews away on it. Is the visitor a man or a dybbuk? Is the wife mistaken, or is she more right than her husband wants to believe? We were left with a similar question at the end of the Coen brothers' last film, No Country for Old Men: was Javier Bardem an evil man or evil incarnate? When he walked away from that car accident at the end, was he defeated or just momentarily hobbled, soon to return to his spree of destruction?

For most of its length, A Serious Man concerns the Job-like sufferings of Larry Gopnik, a suburban Jewish math professor whose status as a long-suffering everyman is punctuated by the filmmakers' decision to have him portrayed by the relatively unknown (yet brilliant) Michael Stuhlbarg. Larry's life, when we meet him, is pretty depressing, but he seems grateful enough for it. That changes when his domineering wife decides to leave him for an insufferable widower. Suddenly the fact that his kids are self-absorbed brats, that his brother is a jobless, friendless social leper, that his job is threatened by a grade-obsessed foreign-exchange student, and that his goy neighbor quite evidently hates his guts—suddenly all that stuff doesn't seem as tolerable as it once did. Eventually, he turns to religion for support, but the rabbis he approaches—there are three of them, each more experienced, and inscrutable, than the last—can't give him the answer he wants. Why is this happening to him? All religion can tell him is that it's God's will. But is that really true? Why would God want to punish him this way? It's impossible to say.

Joel and Ethan Coen are chasing something dark and frightening across the flat American landscape they love so well. Jewish customs, from numerology to the Bar Mitzvah ceremony—which provides the context for one of the best drug-haze sequences since The Big Lebowski—give the story its color and contours, but faith itself—not the Jewish faith—is the subject at hand. Larry, who knows well the uncertainty principle of mathematics, wants to know if there's a plan and, if so, what part he's supposed to play. But as an audience member, it's hard to say which would be more frightening: a universe without order and meaning or one ruled by a God who rains suffering down on his hapless children for reasons known only to himself.” – Michael Hogan, Vanity Fair

A Serious Man is very comparable to Alexander Payne's masterwork  Election , which just happens to be one of my favorite films of all time. Both films are brilliant dark comedies about teachers who are trying to do their best, trying to do the right thing, and somewhere along the way, make one small bad decision which spirals out of control into the biggest mess you've ever seen.

A Serious Man is set in 1967, and centers on Larry Gopnick ( Michael Stuhlbarg ) a midwestern professor who is faced with divorce, and all the consequences that may bring to his Jewish family, which includes a son prepping for Bar Mitzvah while evading bullies at school, a daughter, and his crazy gambling brother who keeps getting into more trouble. Larry seeks answers from three local rabbi, none of which are able to give him any advice he believes to be of value. And things only get worse, because they certainly aren't getting any better.

A Serious Man is my favorite Coen Brothers film produced in the last decade, the exact period of time  since Ethan and Joel created the comedy cult classic  The Big Lewbowski . It is not only a brilliant dark comedy which will have you laughing out loud, but a masterful character study filled with great performances, of a family in crisis, the moral decisions they face, and the horribly funny consequences that result. The ending will have you talking about the  movie well after leaving the theater, which to me is one of the definitions of great cinema.

/Film Rating: 9 out of 10

Can the Coen Brothers ever do wrong? Okay, they  can , but this really isn't one of those times.  A Serious Man is a seriously great film, with some brilliantly dark humor and a simple story that turns out to mean quite a bit by the end. It's probably the most Jewish comedy you'll see all year, about a Jewish family in a small Jewish town. The performances are all great and everything about it is pretty much spot on, but at this point I don't think anyone expects any less from the Coens. And in terms of their comedy, I laughed more during this than I did during  Burn After Reading , and I even really enjoyed that film (at Toronto last year).

A Serious Man actually has a surprisingly different story than you might be expecting, especially if you've  seen the trailer . Everything starts to spin out of control in the life of Larry Gopnik ( Michael Stuhlbarg ), a mathematics professor and father of a Jewish family, when his wife decides to leave him for another man, his crazy brother ( Richard Kind ) won't move out of the house, and he starts to run out of money. Three of the local Rabbis he visits for advice don't really tell him anything of value and he's just about to lose it when his pot-smoking son finally has his Bar Mitzvah. It's simple, but well-written, as usual from the Coens.

It's not that I wasn't  expecting to laugh in a dark comedy from the  Big Lebowski masterminds, I just didn't think I would be able to get into a Jewish comedy as much as I would a spy thriller like  Burn After Reading . However, as I already mentioned, I found myself laughing out loud more in this than in  Burn After Reading . The comedy is dry, often times quite dark, and sometimes even unintentional, but it was perfectly conceived. There's a great message in it that admittedly took me a while to gully figure out, but the film kept Peter from  SlashFilm and I  talking long afterward, which is a sign of great success, or at least spectacular filmmaking.

In short, I really enjoyed this film a lot, which wasn't too big of a surprise for me. In the first few minutes I was already thinking to myself, “God damn, the Coens are brilliant.” They continue to create one great film after another and  A Serious Man is just the latest fantastic feature from these two Minnesotan filmmakers.

Toronto Rating:  9 out of 10